Ainol NOVO 7 Crystal II Quad Core 7″ Tablet is Available for $99

Earlier this year, several blogs and news website reported about Cherry Mobile, a 7″ Android tablet powered by Actions Semiconductor ATM7029 quad core Cortex A9 processor, that sells for just $99 in the Philippines. This morning I’ve found a quad core tablet with similar specifications that also sells for $99 on Asiapads (after using AINOLCII coupon) . The Ainol NOVO 7 Crystal II comes with a 7″ touchscreen, is powered by ATM7029 SoC with 1GB RAM and, 8GB NAND Flash.

This Android 4.1 tablet is sold with a power adapter, a USB cable and a user’s manual in Chinese. I wrote about an other ATM7029 tablet before, and one the weak point of this SoC is Vivante GC1000 Plus GPU which is supposed to perform twice as slow as Vivante GC2000. However, the latter does not perform exactly great in Android, at least compared to Mali-400MP4 and PowerVR SGX544MP2. I had never heard about GC1000 Plus, only GC1000 before, so I don’t know what the “Plus” may bring.

There’s a comprehensive review of Aino NOVO 10 Hero II (ATM7029) on tabletrepulic, and the benchmark results are usually disappointing, except with Antutu v3.

ATM7029 may not be the faster processor around, but it will still (usually) beat dual core processor, and it offers a good price/performance ratio for $99. The device also sells for similar prices, in some cases closer to $90, on Aliexpress.

@Mark
Ainol has released GPL source for the old tablets they sell. I’ve asked on their facebook page about GPL code for their ATM7029 tablets. We’ll see how it goes. Usually they like to wait a few months before releasing the code.